Assessment of Myocardial Perfusion and Anatomical Imaging of the Heart with Arrhythmia Insensitive T1 Contrast Preparation: Myocardial perfusion can be assessed by following the first pass of injected contrast agent (CA) bolus with inversion recovery gradient recalled echo (IR-GRE) sequence. However, prospectively triggered repetitive IR-GRE imaging is sensitive to cardiac arrhythmias because they result in non-equal intervals for longitudinal relaxation between successive images. This introduces random noise to the signal intensity (SI) time curves. In this work, we introduce the Modified Driven Equilibrium Fourier Transform (MDEFT) scheme, which generate T1 contrast independent of the initial magnetization before the preparatory pulse and therefore independent of heart arrhythmias. The MDEFT scheme, i.e. 90o-ti1-180o-ti2-GRE, includes an initial 90o pulse which nulls the longitudinal magnetization (Mz). Thus the evolution of the Mz during the period ti1 is independent of the history of previous pulses. MDEFT-GRE was demonstrated to be an improved sequence for evaluation of the myocardial anatomy and perfusion providing T1 contrast defined by the user and insensitive to cardiac arrhythmias or failures of the triggering mechanism. This feature increases the applicability of the method to patients where arrhythmias are a major problem. Myocardial Tagging with B1 Insensitive Adiabatic DANTE Inversion Sequences: One of the major goals of this core project was to generate adiabatic magnetization preparations for preparation of contrast prior to a rapid imaging technique so as to use surface coils for receive and transmit. We have already accomplished several such contrast mechanisms, and last year we introduced a new technique based on adiabatic DANTE inversion sequences is presented for generating uniform contrast tags across the myocardial wall even in the presence of B1 inhomogeneities is introduced. The utility of this pulse was demonstrated using a surface coil for both transmission and signal reception in phantom and animal heart tagging studies. The experimental data demonstrated uniform grid contrast over a 6-fold variation of B1 magnitude, sharp tagging profiles, and the ability to follow the cardiac wall motion through the deformation of the fine rectangular tagging grid at different phases throughout the cardiac cycle.